Animals as Friends

Animals as Friends

Whether animals, especially companion animals, count as friends depends on the conception of friendship as well as on the conception of animals. Some accounts of friendship can include (other than human) animals more easily than others. I present an argument in favour of characterising some animal-human connections as friendships, and address some of the standard objections to this characterisa...

Companion animals: Translational scientist's new best friends.

Knowledge and resources derived from veterinary medicine represent an underused resource that could serve as a bridge between data obtained from diseases models in laboratory animals and human clinical trials. Naturally occurring disease in companion animals that display the defining attributes of similar, if not identical, diseases in humans hold promise for providing predictive proof of conce...

Humans and Other Animals—Future Friends or Foe?

Since the opening editorial, Animals has got off to an excellent start. Thirty articles were published in 2011, which comprise 446 pages of volume 1, and already 25 articles have been published this year in 360 pages of volume 2. Meanwhile the impact of other MDPI journals continues to grow; mean impact factor of the ten journals that have been in existence long enough to be assessed was 1.9, a...

Friends looking out for friends as an intervention strategy for young adults’ risky driving

INTRODUCTION The young adult age group is at the highest risk of road trauma [1]. Further, the motor vehicle crash (MVC) risk for young adult drivers typically increases with the presence of a passenger [2]. While traditionally road safety strategies have focused on changing the driver there may be considerable opportunity to improve safety by developing passenger safety interventions. In parti...

Are Animals As Irrational As Humans?